Movie adaptations are everywhere in London’s West End. So a new “Days of Wine and Roses” seems straightforward – a new version of the 1962 Blake Edwards movie. And yet – this “world première” is a riff off the 1973 stage version. That in turn was based on the first Days of Wine and Roses, a play for television, broadcast live in 1958.
Tag: 02.15.05
Lincoln On Historical Steroids
It’s three months before the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum is supposed to open in Springfield, Illinois. “Museum officials say they’re blending scholarship and showmanship on a scale never attempted before, without undermining the accuracy of the history they present. If they succeed, they contend, museums all over the world will imitate them. If they fail, they know — because it’s started to happen already — they’ll be savaged for Disneyfying the past.”
Reinventing Ohio Ballet
Ohio Ballet is picking up speed lately after a “rough transition since 1999, when founding artistic director Heinz Poll retired and his successor, Jeffrey Graham Hughes, took the company’s reins. Turnover in personnel has been high, attendance at performances low. But such problems are not unusual for a dance company that makes dramatic changes in leadership style and artistic product.”
See Color Through Music
A blind student who needed to read colored maps has developed software that helps him see the colors by translating them into musical notes. The software “assigns one of 88 piano notes to individually coloured pixels – ranging from blue at the lower end of this scale to red at the upper end.”
Radio In A Downloadable World
Is music downloading going to kill traditional radio? A Berlin station thinks so. MotorFM, launched Feb. 1, “abandons on-air commercials in favor of generating revenue from MP3 downloads and targeted sponsoring of its programming. The next step will be streaming audio directly to 3G cell phones and letting listeners pay for downloads by SMS text message.”
Conductor Sixten Ehrling, 86
Sixten Ehrling, Sweden’s most prominent conductor who ran the Stockholm Royal Opera and Detroit Symphony Orchestra and conducted the “Ring” at the New York Metropolitan, has died aged 86
Carib Indians Protest Disney Movie Plans
“The Carib Indians of Dominica are upset over a Walt Disney film that would portray them as cannibals. The film is a sequel to 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which starred Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom.”
Taruskin And His Thematic Music History
Richard Taruskin’s new 3,800-page, 1.25-million-word history of classical music is a thematic telling of the story. “This notion – that even the most “transcendent” music is at the same time part of the complex political and social currents of its time – is Taruskin’s great theme. All that stuff we grew up with about composers being autonomous, divinely inspired geniuses is one of many shopworn intellectual heirlooms from German romanticism that Taruskin turfs out. In his book, composers take their place as “collaborative participants, along with patrons, performers, scribes, editors, publishers, critics, audiences and many others, in what the sociologist Howard Becker calls an ‘art world.’”
Will New Law Chase Art Sellers Out Of UK?
Next year the UK will require that artists (or their heirs) get a portion of the resale price of an art work. “Many fear the levy, which comes in on 1 January 2006, will force vendors out of the UK in favour of non-EU countries like Switzerland and the US.”
La Traviata As Dance?
With stage plays being adapted from movies, dance is being adapted from… opera. Ismene Brown isn’t impressed with Northern Ballet’s latest effort. “This is the way the art of ballet will end, with a sentimental whimper, an easy tear in its eye, and not a squeak of true life as theatrical dance. If the novelisation of successful movies is thought a pretty bogus form of literature, how much worse is a balletisation of an opera masterpiece such as Verdi’s La traviata.”